The extreme violence of Uganda’s militant LRA

Despite taboos and lost legitimacy, armed groups around the world engage in extreme acts of violence, symbolic and otherwise. In order for decision-makers to understand what can be done about the increasing brutality, they must understand what’s behind it. In the fourth installment of Baker Institute Viewpoints, an institute postdoctoral fellow in drug policy and two outside scholars conducting doctoral research on these issues explain why some armed groups utilize extreme symbolic forms of violence, and how they justify their actions. The series will run each day through Thursday.

Today guest writer Michael Hampson weighs in on Uganda’s Lord’s Resistance Army, the topic of his doctoral thesis at the University of California, Irvine.

With the Kony 2012 video about the abuses of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony making its way through the Internet, more people than ever are aware of the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA), a ruthless insurgency that has operated in central Africa for decades. Unfortunately, the Kony 2012 video has done little to foster a real understanding of the motivations for the LRA’s horrific brutality.

Why does the LRA commit acts of extreme violence? It does so because it is weak, and has few other means by which to gain compliance from the civilian population. In a cost-benefit context, violence can be viewed as a rational strategy for a group with limited resources. The LRA has never been able to create a governing force through traditional means; therefore, the LRA has had to use violence. Violence creates fear, fear creates compliance, and compliance creates a form of governance, which allows the LRA to survive.

For the LRA to be effective in controlling the population, the LRA must institute a level of fear that prevents the population from resisting it. Mutilations and public executions create a level of fear that induces the population to defer to the LRA. The LRA commonly cuts off the lips, ears, tongue, hands, feet or some combination thereof of its victims. When someone has their lips cut off there is little that can hide the scars, and subsequently the individual becomes a symbol of the LRA’s power. It costs the LRA very little to mutilate an individual, and the payoff is quite large; therefore, violence is an efficient and cost effective form of control.

The same logic applies to the abduction of the children by the LRA. The abduction of children by the LRA serves two purposes. First, the abductions solve a critical manpower issue for the LRA. The LRA has never had a very large force, and supplementing their forces with children ensures what the group views as a stock of malleable troops. Second, abductions send fear throughout the community. No one wants to be abducted or have their children abducted. They all know the abuse, the forced killings, and the horrors that come with being forced into the LRA. With those fears in mind, the civilian population goes through extraordinary efforts to avoid LRA abduction of their children. Violence and abductions form an efficient means of control for the LRA that comes with very few short-terms costs.

What can be done to combat the LRA?

Currently, the United States, the African Union and the Uganda People Defense Force (UDPF) are attempting to hunt down the LRA. The involvement of United States and the easing of cross-border operations is a major step in the right direction in fighting the LRA, but the organization has an uncanny ability to survive. The LRA has become masters of the rough terrain of the regions it operates in, which poses a serious impediment to tracking it. Those tracking the LRA do not have the same knowledge of the territory, thus their reaction time and ability to adequately protect the population is reduced. In addition to U.S. and UDPF’s efforts, two additional tactics can be used to fight the LRA.

First, civilian militias can be armed and trained to defend themselves against the LRA. What have been called “arrow boys” — villagers armed with arrows dipped in poison — have been used with relative success in both Uganda and Sudan. This tactic holds many potential pitfalls, but if control can exerted over the civilian militias, they can raise the costs of violence for the LRA, thereby negating the utility of violence. The key however, is to make sure that there are reins placed upon militias, and someone can exert control over them. Arming civilians raises the cost of violence for the LRA and creates a power dynamic that begins to approach parity.

Second, technology can be utilized to communicate more effectively the whereabouts of the LRA and alert other villages, thereby placing more pressure on the organization. This does not necessitate high-end technology, but can be a simple communication system that can alert nearby villages to possible LRA activity. LRACrisisTracker.com already operates a system that can be expanded and disseminated to more villages. By creating a tracking system, the LRA’s advantage of terrain would be lessened, and the costs of action for the LRA would be increased.

The LRA has never been a powerful insurgency in terms of numbers or popular support, but it has supplemented its weakness with extreme levels violence. Violence forms an economical means of control, and to combat the LRA, violence must become uneconomical. Raising the costs of violence will force the LRA to either rethink its tactics, or to move to an easier target and hopefully give the United States and the UDPF more time to neutralize them.

Michael Hampson is a University of California, Irvine, political science doctoral candidate writing his thesis on the Lord’s Resistance Army.

2 Responses

Sometimes running to the fireplace when the fire is burnt down is a mocary…where were the americans when kony was killing abducting and maming people in uganda? Could this be because of the oil discovered in uganda….

Its a bit more complicated than that. Sovereignty and Ugandan politics are two things that the US cannot control. Using resources as a uni-casual explanation for the actions of the United States is a drastic over simplification of the issue.

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